Neural coding of continuous speech in auditory cortex during monaural and dichotic listening
Nai Ding,Jonathan Z. Simon +1 more
TLDR
These findings characterize how the spectrotemporal features of speech are encoded in human auditory cortex and establish a single-trial-based paradigm to study the neural basis underlying the cocktail party phenomenon.Abstract:
The cortical representation of the acoustic features of continuous speech is the foundation of speech perception. In this study, noninvasive magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings are obtained from human subjects actively listening to spoken narratives, in both simple and cocktail party-like auditory scenes. By modeling how acoustic features of speech are encoded in ongoing MEG activity as a spectrotemporal response function, we demonstrate that the slow temporal modulations of speech in a broad spectral region are represented bilaterally in auditory cortex by a phase-locked temporal code. For speech presented monaurally to either ear, this phase-locked response is always more faithful in the right hemisphere, but with a shorter latency in the hemisphere contralateral to the stimulated ear. When different spoken narratives are presented to each ear simultaneously (dichotic listening), the resulting cortical neural activity precisely encodes the acoustic features of both of the spoken narratives, but slightly weakened and delayed compared with the monaural response. Critically, the early sensory response to the attended speech is considerably stronger than that to the unattended speech, demonstrating top-down attentional gain control. This attentional gain is substantial even during the subjects' very first exposure to the speech mixture and therefore largely independent of knowledge of the speech content. Together, these findings characterize how the spectrotemporal features of speech are encoded in human auditory cortex and establish a single-trial-based paradigm to study the neural basis underlying the cocktail party phenomenon.read more
Citations
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Right-hemisphere coherence to speech at pre-reading stages predicts reading performance one year later
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The effects of data quantity on performance of temporal response function analyses of natural speech processing
Juraj Mesík,Magdalena Wojtczak +1 more
TL;DR: This work uses a dual-talker continuous speech paradigm to demonstrate how a key parameter of experimental design, the quantity of acquired data, influences TRF analyses fit to either individual data (subject-specific analyses), or group data (generic analyses).
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Unattended processing of hierarchical pitch variations in spoken sentences
Xiaoqing Li,Yiya Chen +1 more
TL;DR: The results suggest that, in an unattentive state, the human brain can functionally disentangle hierarchically different levels of pitch variation, and the brain responses to these pitch variations are time‐locked to the presence of the acoustic cues.
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Contributions of local speech encoding and functional connectivity to audio-visual speech integration
Bruno L. Giordano,Robin A. A. Ince,Joachim Gross,Stefano Panzeri,Philippe G. Schyns,Christoph Kayser +5 more
TL;DR: A role of auditory-motor interactions in visual speech representations is demonstrated and functional connectivity along the ventral pathway facilitates speech comprehension in multisensory environments and is suggested to enhance functional connectivity between temporal and inferior frontal cortex.
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Neural tracking of the fundamental frequency of the voice: male voices preferred
TL;DR: Results indicated that response strength is inversely related to f0 frequency and rate of f0 change throughout the story, and response strength greatly improves for voices with strong higher harmonics, which is particularly useful to boost the small responses evoked by voices with high f0.
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